Biography of Captain George Henry Bell

Captain George Henry Bell, believed to be son of Frederick Bell, married a sister of General Herkimer and was a man of considerable note in the revolution. He was well educated and wrote a neat, compact hand with much rapidity, we are told in an account of him in the old history of the Mohawk Valley. Although not among the officers of the militia appointed in 1775, he commanded a company at the battle of Oriskany and was wounded. In later years he was pensioned for this service. He remained on the field with General Herkimer until the battle was over and he took charge of the escort of the wounded commander, who was borne on a litter for thirty miles. Captain Bell brought a gun from Oriskany, taken in a hand-to-hand fight with a British officer whom he killed. The gun was kept as a memento by his family for some generations. He served in Colonel Peter Bellinger’s regiment from Tryon county and also in the Fourth Regiment in the revolution. (See pp. 182 and 271, “New York in the Revolution”). During and after the war he was a justice of the peace. His first commission was dated February 2, 1978, and others were dated July 8, 1784, and in 1790. He lived on the patent granted his father and on account of Indians he had a palisade of pickets about his stone house. We are told that his son Joseph was killed in the service and that Nicholas was also in the revolution and was killed and scalped by the Indians and Tories about a mile from his father’s house on the road over to Fort Hill. Nicholas had a son, Colonel Joost Bell, and Captain George Henry Bell had two daughters, one of whom married Henry I. Walrad, the other Peter Wagener.

There was a Frederick Bell in Colonel Samuel Campbell’s regiment, the First Tryon County.